Beyond the Winter Wind: Aurora, the Big Dipper, and Home
One winter night, I wondered if the aurora that had supposedly appeared a few days earlier might be fluttering faintly in the sky. I decided to step out into the backyard. I hadn't even opened the door yet, but I could already sense the persistence of the winter wind humming loudly.
I parted the blinds and gently slid open the patio door. The moment I did, the cold-laden wind surged in as if it had been waiting. The two cats that had been trailing me flinched and froze in their tracks, twitching their noses, alternating their gaze between the dark backyard and my face. Even in this loudly frigid night, their desire to go outside remained undiminished. I quickly stepped out onto the deck and shut the door behind me. The two cats stood motionless behind the glass, wearing their usual expression—one that seemed to say they couldn’t quite accept being shut out again. Soon, they would each settle into the plush fur rug on the bench, limbs stretching with drowsy ease.
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The wind whipped around aimlessly, stirring a subtle irritation. Not only did it leave the musty smell of cigarettes clinging to clothes and hair, it also made the act of lighting one a laborious task. I had come out to see if the aurora was visible, but found myself more focused on the trouble of smoking. The wind, with no clear destination and only bitter cold to scatter, felt like the furious driver I had seen earlier that day.
To him, a driver ahead who obeyed the speed limit was an unbearable object of hatred. His driving brimmed with rage. His twisted face must have been spewing curses. He seemed intoxicated by the pounding of his own wrathful heart, perhaps driven by anxiety or fear, a restless urgency chasing after himself. Or perhaps he was someone lacking financial stability.
Most of the time, the creator of such negative emotions is none other than myself. Like a black hole suddenly born in the universe of consciousness, anger swallows every emotion and ounce of reason. I figured the angry driver might not even know why he was so furious—or if he did, perhaps it was because he had no way to resolve it. Usually, if you know the cause, you seek a solution. Sometimes, though, even knowing the cause, one refuses to acknowledge it. One of the most unmanageable reasons is “privation.” Not so much a lack of income, but rather the inability to spend or desire freely. Even with increased income, the anxiety of not being able to maintain that state lingers.
Often, those who experience such deprivation have no leisure time, either. Even if they are unemployed or underemployed and have time to spare, their minds don’t allow peace to reign. When time cannot be converted into money, people grow anxious and frustrated. Capitalism, obsessed with the idea that “time is money,” is always shrouded in fear. Through others and endless media, we are constantly fed worries and anxieties. Compared to the sheer volume of information, the concern for intent, substance, or truth is pitifully small. One or two eye-catching accidents are exaggerated as if they represent the whole. Perhaps we fear because of a fundamental despair that we may never truly grasp noble values like truth. Even those who are not materially deprived are not free from fear.
I wondered: if wind—this two-dimensional being that can be visualized with a simple arrow—had a heart, what would it look like? Perhaps like a fluttering scrap of paper midway along the shaft of that arrow. The wind, rushing from all directions and beyond description by a single arrow, had transcended the two-dimensional and become a three-dimensional presence.
Most people had already fallen asleep, with no time to entertain anxious thoughts or swelling anticipation. It's a world far from easy to face with only a happy dream. Yet from a distance, with the eyes of an observer, it sometimes appears peaceful. Happiness often comes from similar reasons, while unhappiness arises from uniquely personal ones. It was just about the time to leave “the room called Today.” The world seemed calm, and the unruly winter wind almost appeared to resent that calm, raging more fiercely in jealousy. I wondered: what fears or anxieties did the wind carry? Could even the wind—seemingly free from all bounds—be subject to the pressures of time? This natural phenomenon, which can only rage within certain meteorological conditions like air pressure and temperature, was unable to escape the tyranny of time.
The cold was starting to seep into my limbs and brain, and I thought I’d better head back inside. Still, I decided to look a little longer at the seven stars hanging faintly in the northern sky. Since the aurora hadn’t shown, I settled for observing the Big Dipper instead.
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At that moment, any thoughts I had about the aurora disappeared from the horizon of my awareness. The Big Dipper, seen again after a long while, shimmered faintly in the violently swaying wind. Stars pinned to the freezing winter sky appeared particularly clear—perhaps because of the thin film of tears formed by the cold air, or perhaps because the stars themselves were preening under the watchful eyes of observers.
I thought about what kind of wish to place in that ladle-shaped constellation. A healthy life? Happiness for my loved ones? Someone once said that our ordinary, everyday life is already happiness. It’s not entirely wrong. Perhaps because of that, we sometimes console ourselves by calling even difficult and painful days “happiness.”
Like Tyltyl and Mytyl’s bluebird, even happiness needs to eat and sleep. Nature offers enough for us to survive—to eat, wear, and rest. But for a long time now, that alone hasn’t satisfied our idea of happiness. In our hunger for more, we seek mountains, fields, rivers, and seas to find solace. Ideals are always beautiful—because they can never be fully possessed.
One’s happiness cannot be attributed solely to personal effort or luck. Sometimes, our happiness is paid for by someone else’s misfortune, sacrifice, or loss. The kind of happiness we prioritize today is deeply mired in materialism. Living under what Nietzsche called the "morality of slaves," we often feel proud of ourselves, but at times we sink into doubt. Rather than longing for an unattainable idea(l), it seems more meaningful to pursue the steady growth of ourselves and this world. Within such meaningful pursuits, there must surely be happiness.
Even as I pondered what wish to make, the fierce wind kept scattering my thoughts. Still, I lingered a little longer, wanting to place something—anything—into that celestial ladle.
Despite being scattered across vastly different regions of the universe, those stars appeared equidistant from me in two-dimensional space. For a moment, I looked at the stars through the consciousness of the Aristotelian era, when such perceptions shaped the understanding of the world. In the flat plane of the sky, those stars formed the shape of a ladle, collecting the hopes of countless observers. The stars, each occupying a unique position in the universe, felt like the myriad thoughts within my consciousness—each varying in brightness, size, and place, yet still all simply thoughts under the same category. A flattened universe is no different than categorized thoughts, and the Big Dipper fixed within that flat universe is an objective correlate to a receptive view of hope. It suddenly felt strange—how we assign meaning to something whose actual form differs completely from how it appears, and then follow that meaning regardless of the real substance. It felt similar to how people depend on God. Because we can dream, we often become bound by those dreams, failing to realize the chains around our ankles. Yet it is also those very dreams that allow us to endure suffering. So where do I stand? I stood at a place where I knew the chains were there, yet couldn’t break them; where I rejected illusions, yet could not part with them.
In the end, I could no longer bear the cold. The fluttering traces of my thoughts felt as if they would vanish beyond the horizon of my awareness. I rushed back inside. The wish I had tried to place, shifting from the aurora to the Big Dipper, returned with me to where I had begun. It wasn’t hard to find the cats. One lay curled on the fur rug, the other stretched across the sofa, quietly watching me. Soon, they would resume their dreams, sip some water or eat their kibble, and live into tomorrow.
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